At Google I/O: Meet Google Wave, and HTML Video Comes to Chrome

Yesterday, we covered news coming out of the Google I/O developer event in San Francisco, including new offerings for web developers and a new iteration of the Android Developer Challenge, with cash prizes. Today, Google I/O is continuing, and there is more interesting news. The company is giving developers an early look at a new project called Google Wave. It's a combination of conversation- and document-sharing online, including mashups of photos, videos, maps and more. Google has also announced HTML 5-based video support in its Chrome browser, which--like other open source browsers such as Firefox--will allow users to display video without a plug-in such as Flash. Here are more details.

According to the announcement of Google Wave:

"A 'wave' is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

You can find a screenshot of Wave below, where a user is mashing up snapshots, forum messages, lists of contacts, and more. There is also more information here, to include video of Wave later today. According to the Google Blog:

"Here's how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved."

Webware also has a nice report up on the new HTML video features in Google Chrome, found here. HTML 5-based video on the web is targeted to give developers and users better options for working with video than Flash provides.

UPDATE: There is now a video of the demo of Google Wave from Google I/O, including discussion of Google's open source goals with Wave, posted here.